Thunder Rock

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GB, 1942 d Roy Boulting, p John Boulting

"Thunder Rock is about a man imagining and bringing to life characters. Normally, if they are ghosts, it would be double exposure, some kind of a cliche. But I wanted some way to say they are three-dimensional, and yet there is something wrong about them.

"I discussed it with my Director of Photography, Mutz Greenbaum, who taught me a hell of a lot about film-making over the years and he had this wonderful idea.

"We built a test set at an angle of 15 degrees; in the end, we had to lower it to 12 degrees. We put people on it and had them move around. As they moved around, of course they had to respond to the laws of gravity. So on the screen, although the set doesn't move at all and appears horizontal, they are moving in a very, very weird fashion. People who saw the film said, 'What is it about those characters?'"

Roy Boulting